Trying to keep it down

What do you get when you combine pork rinds, cottage cheese, marshmallow peeps, sardines… What do you get when you combine pork rinds, cottage cheese, marshmallow peeps, sardines and pickles? A handful of engineering students barfing in buckets and trash cans Tuesday afternoon at the Mystery Eats competition — an annual E-Week event.

If you’re not repulsed yet, add pickled cauliflower, powdered doughnuts, hot sauce, bologna, banana chips and tofu to the list of foods — which extends even further to contain approximately 30 different edible items.

At the start of the competition held outside of Benedum Hall, E-Week Chair Jane Haven explained the rules to the eight different teams of three members each — representing the eight different engineering departments.

“If you chew and swallow food, and then throw up, it counts as eating it. But if you chew food and spit it out without swallowing, then it doesn’t count,” Haven said. “Every little bit of food must be consumed.”

And every little bit was.

Behind two large tables lined with plastic, the contestants stood waiting for “runners” to bring to them samples of various foods from an adjacent table. Team members took turns eating the food items in a timed race, which lasted a few seconds short of 30 minutes.

Each team was given a total of six bottles of water to use sparingly when needed.

“You can drink as much water as you’d like — but that’s all you get,” Haven instructed.

Nate Phillips, a junior from the civil engineering department, was the first to throw up after drinking cottage cheese from a cup.

“It was the volume of it. It wasn’t the taste,” he said. “Your gag reflex kicks in when you’re trying to swallow a whole cupful.”

And Phillips certainly wasn’t the only one to get sick. Soon enough, the trash cans and buckets surrounding the area served their purpose as students rushed to bring back up what was quickly inhaled.

Freshman Tyesha McPherson wrinkled her nose and cupped her hands over her mouth before rushing to a nearby bucket moments after drinking a shot of hot sauce from a Dixie cup.

“For me, the hot sauce did it — followed by the cup of sweetened condensed milk,” she explained.

The students who crowded around to watch the competition didn’t diminish in number when the purging began to rapidly occur. Instead they offered cheers of encouragement and support.

“Don’t even think about it. Just chew, chew, swallow!” shouted Glinda Harvey, the mechanical engineering graduate secretary.

Initially, the competition was only supposed to last for 15 minutes, but halfway through, Haven decided to let the game continue until all of the food was consumed. Contestants were required to eat the food on plates first, and then finish off the contents of cups and bowls. The last items to be gulped down were the beverages — such as milk, Kool-Aid and soda.

As if he was shotgunning a can of beer, senior Patrick McCarthy grabbed a pen and pierced a can of Faygo Red Pop to guzzle it down faster. This move caused his team, the Material Science Engineers, to place first in the competition.

With red soda stains on his face, McCarthy described what caused him to throw up midway through the contest.

“The pork rinds did it for me, but they didn’t come out until I ate the tomato,” he said.

Fellow teammate and winner Carrie Davis, a senior, had the most difficult time eating the six slices of dry bread. But she was clever enough to think of a way to ingest them quickly.

“I just drenched all of the bread in water. That way, it was slimy and slid down easier,” she explained.

Rob Buckingham, an E-Week representative from the electrical engineering department, offered his opinion as to why engineers enjoy such a grotesque event.

“Because we’re sick, twisted people who never get out of this building!” he joked.

In all, the general consensus as to what triggered students to vomit: the cottage cheese.

E-Week continues for the rest of this week, and concludes with the annual Shamrock Ball Friday evening.